天下制覇

Damn, Araya.

Impressions:

Ahhhhh… nothing  like a bloody two hour movie to liven up your day. This is the story of Kara no Kyoukai though, so I made sure to make time for it. I was a little put off at the start. The animation was a bit flakey and extremely unnatural. It settled down into UFOTable’s normal excellence soon enough, and they really did a good job mixing in Tomoe’s hallucinations naturally and not particularly excessively. The CG hallway walk made me chuckle, but it wasn’t really that bad and certainly didn’t detract from the visuals otherwise.

I did feel that the direction took a little bit of a hit during the Touko/Kokutou parts. It jumped around between different points in time, and while it wasn’t hard to follow, it felt unnatural and more than a bit forced. They were also shoved right after Ryougi’s big fight and were about 15 straight minutes of talking heads. The action sequences were probably the best yet for this series. Ryougi’s fight against Araya and his puppets was spectacular. Touko’s fight against him was less awesome, but it was still nice to see her throw her weight around for real. The second Ryougi vs Araya was alright, but it was confounded by a wildly spastic camera that swung in every direction, which made things completely impossible to actually follow.

Overall though, they continued to do an awesome job. Araya felt as massively powerful as he should have, Tomoe was about as sympathetic as you’d expect a hallucinating deranged puppet to be, and Touko got her moment in the sun. Although it does make me a little sad because this really is the high point of Rakkyo, and while I do like proto-Akiha, there’s really little else that can match up to this one. Yes. My complaint for this one shall be that the remaining two can’t possibly stack up. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Ryougi and Araya: Round 1

Sorry that the summary’s sort of haphazardly placed. It’s hard to organize well across two hours while keeping things brief and to the important bits. There were more than a few voice overed montages, especially at the start of each part.

A boy named Tomoe kills his parents, but when the police investigate, they’re alive and well. Later, he gets into a fight with some other punks. He viciously attacks them, gouging out their eyes, but is overwhelmed. A girl appears, and beats up all the punks and then decides to take him in when he tells her that he can’t go home.

Ryougi takes in Shirou Tomoe, but he keeps having visions of both killing his parents, and his mother killing him before killing herself. He sees his mother and father alive in the city and panicks, knowing that he killed them because he had visions of his mother killing him. They bond over the long time Tomoe stays with her and he tells her about his hallucinations. He says her that he’d die for her. During this time, Tomoe notices a man in red (Arba) stalking Ryougi, but she doesn’t care about it and just laughs him off.

Eventually, Tomoe brings Ryougi to his home where they find an illusion of his parents and himself and watch as Tomoe’s vision of his mother’s murder-suicide of their family happens. Ryougi recognizes the illusion and leads Tomoe to another room identical to his own with his parents long since dead. The corpses of the building come to life and attack them, and Ryougi’s attacked by a man named Souren Araya who has no lines of death on him.

He is obsessed with understanding the Root, and Ryougi’s eyes have seen it. To study it, he created a building where death and life are one and forced people to die over and over again to study them. He also manipulated the other people that Ryougi fought after her to understand her eyes. Tomoe was an aberration that escaped. Ryougi is defeated by Araya and captured, but Araya seemingly dies from the fight just after.

Kokutou is worried about her, so he talks Touko into going to the building to check things out, but their only lead comes from Arba. She has a past with both him and Araya and tells Kokutou about when they were together at the academy. They encounter many of the same things as Ryougi, and both agree that the building is completely unnatural.

Touko later goes to Arba alone to confront him and easily defeats him, but Araya is still alive and interferes. She manages to seemingly defeat him, but he then appears behind her and stabs her through the chest, tearing out her heart.

Kokutou meanwhile finds Tomoe and they agree to help each other save Ryougi. First though, Kokutou wants to show Tomoe something. He brings Tomoe to his real home. Tomoe remembers all about his family and how much they cared for him. His father gave him the key to their home, saying that he had to protect them.

At the apartments, Tomoe sneaks in the back while Kokuto goes in the front. Arba confronts Kokutou holding Touko’s severed head and ranting crazily.

Arba physically beats Kokutou around, but she walks in the apartment behind him and makes him even crazier. Tomoe meanwhile finds the real remaining body of Araya, a grotesque creature bound to the building and all sorts of crazy crap. He reveals that Tomoe was just meant to bring Ryougi to him, a puppet made just for that.

Tomoe accepts that he’s fake, but he loves Ryougi and what he’s done and the time he’s spent are real, so he will save her. Araya doesn’t care and leaves. Tomoe goes upstairs to face Araya, even as his body begins to completely fall apart. Tomoe tries to attack Araya, and manages to stab him in the chest, but Araya then erases his body. Touko meanwhile releases an even nastier creature than before and chews Arba to little bits.

Araya goes to confront Touka, but she reveals that Araya made a mistake. He put Ryougi in a mystical barrier instead of a physical one. In the distraction Tomoe provided, Ryougi escaped. Araya and Ryougi fight again, culminating with Araya leaping from the building and trying to destroy it on top of her.

She follows him down and stabs him, landing on him to cushion the fall. Touko provides some wrapup as Araya goes on about death and mankind before dying. In a dream, Tomoe says farewell to Ryougi.

Preview:

Crimson red vermillion.